


Caressing a Ghost

by JazzRaft



Series: Dark at Night [36]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: M/M, Reunions, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-19 00:24:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10628301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: He hadn’t grieved. But looking at him now, exactly the same yet so different, he felt the ten years snap like a rubber band breaking.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/158683146822/i-dont-know-if-youve-gotten-this-already-but) for an anonymous request.

He knew him in an instant.

Nyx rushed out into the parking lot behind his brothers and they were all ten years younger. Those eyes flickered over Nyx and time was nothing. He had no name for the feeling that passed through him. An amalgamation of deep agony, relief, and something strange that felt like grief, but wasn’t really. It emptied him, perpetuated a feeling of loss.

He hadn’t grieved Noctis when he lost him to the Crystal. Not even after it was suggested that he should. That he was wound so tight, they were all afraid he might snap. He should let it in, let himself feel the absence. But there was no loss to grieve. Because even without holding him every night, even after waking up the first few months from nightmares and breaking something when there was no one next to him, Noctis was never gone.

Nyx pulled his hand through the air and there they were. His faithful companions. They didn’t vanish once in all the ten years he was gone. A constant assurance that he was alive. Somewhere. And despite how badly Nyx wanted him _here_ , next to him, affirming that he lived by burying his face in his chest and hearing his heart pound, he settled for it. For the tug in his blood like fingers in the sleeve of his jacket. Like arms around his neck. Like teeth over his lip.

He hadn’t grieved. But looking at him now, exactly the same yet so different, he felt the ten years snap like a rubber band breaking. A tension that had been shivering across the stretch of time finally slipped from his fingers and bit back into him. He felt it all at once. Every year of grief he’d suppressed in each step Noctis took towards him. Until he was _there._ Right in front of him. Close enough for Nyx to touch. To reach shaking fingers out and be terrified that if he brushed them over his arm they would pass right through him.

Those eyes – the only anchors into reality for Nyx to grapple on to – shifted from his face to his shaking hands. There was an uncertainty to them. Fear shifting beneath the surface. And it was that shade of anxiety which pulled at Nyx’s instinct enough to believe that he could be real. He recognized the profound need to hold him, to card fingers through his hair, to tell him without uttering a word that everything was okay.

A little bolt of terror struck through him as he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around him. In the instant before his body touched his, he was so afraid that reaching out would prove he wasn’t real. But then he felt him, solid, warm against his chest. Fitting in that vacant space that only he was allowed to occupy. And all that grief rewound itself back to when he’d felt the happiest. When they’d been in a vacuum of “no one can touch us.” To late summer nights tangled in his sheets, hidden in the depths of the city, passing idle kisses over naked skin. Lethargic “love you”s in the midnight heat.

Even with all that warmth, Nyx’s body shook like he was bleeding out. And it was Noctis holding him to ward off the unsaid fears instead. He spoke and it was like ice on an aching bruise.

“Hey, hero.”

Later, they were alone in the caravan. It was the final rest before the walk into the city. They all knew they would need it, but everyone was restless. The king had returned. There was so much to say, so little time to say it that sleep felt so trivial by comparison. Nyx took to tending to his knives. The only constant in his life. Through Galahd, through Insomnia, through Altissia, through that damn rock in Gralea, he still had this. Throughout all his losses in life, the knives needed him not to break. They needed his care so, he needed to care for himself.

He slid the whetstone over a blade as he watched Noctis. He’d washed up, changed into some of Nyx’s spare clothes, put on the whole show of getting ready for bed, but Nyx knew he had no intention of sleeping. He could see it in the luster of his eyes. Nyx watched them in the mirror. Noctis had his back to him, staring at the foreign reflection. Gripping the sink, motionless, and just staring. His head would turn in imperceptible shifts, as if he needed to move to prove that the man looking back at him was truly himself.

“You’re not that different,” Nyx uttered into the quiet, drawing Noctis’s eye in the mirror.

“A little different,” he said to Nyx’s image in the dirty glass. “You’re the same.”

Nyx smiled, half-heartedly, and shook his head. “No. Definitely not.”

Noctis turned away from the talking reflections, crossing over to where Nyx sat at the edge of the mattress stuffed in the corner. There was a hesitation to his movements as he settled next to Nyx. And a distance he put between them that sharpened Nyx’s attention as well as the dagger he set aside.

They were quiet. Nyx didn’t know how to read the silence. There was one thing he didn’t recognize about Noctis’s stare; a secretiveness shadowing underneath. A dark stain of resolve that Nyx didn’t remember seeing ten years ago. That was different. About the only thing, really.

Nyx reached forward to drift his fingers through the longer strands of hair. Soft and familiar. His hand moved slowly through the caress of ebon silk, following old, neglected paths beneath the over-grown locks. The memories enfolded his wandering hands like awakened phantoms, gently adjusting him onto the roads his touch had paved a thousand times. His nails grazed delicately across his hair, before his fingers slowly parted through the thick tresses, let them fill into the dips between each digit and spill across his knuckles. His thumb traced a line up from the tip of Noct’s ear, hand spreading against his scalp, calloused pads of his fingers circling, pressing so lightly against the skin.

Noctis blinked, long and slow, watching his face. Searching for some kind of doubt. Some kind of rejection to the change. But the more Nyx touched him, the less lost he became. This face was his home. This hair, his eyes had been a door Noctis had opened to him when he was without shelter. Let him come inside, feel his warmth, feed himself with his love. He was still home. A little older, a little dusty inside, hadn’t felt a tender touch in far too long.

As Nyx’s coveting hands grew more certain, a breath neither of them had noticed Noctis had been holding escaped him in a long sigh. He finally eased into the touch, pressing his face into the hunter’s rough palm. Eyes falling shut as if hypnotized. A delicate noise hummed in the back of his throat, encouraging the contact. Nyx smiled, his other hand passing over the shadow of hair along Noctis’s jaw. Roamed the back of his hand down his neck. Opened it against his chest, feeling the muscles more defined than they used to be. Sensitive places Nyx could remember pushing his fingers into to make him squirm were more filled out, his body a little harder now. Tougher. To prepare for the battle to come.

“Not quite my little king anymore, are you?” Nyx murmured.

Noctis looked at him like his words had hurt, touch-starved skin stiffening from where Nyx had just been softening across it. His lips parted, but whatever words he thought to say died on his tongue. Nyx caught the beginnings of a retreat in his eyes, and pulled forward just before his mouth could close. His kisses had been like bruises in Nyx’s brain for ten damn years. Remembering them had been like opening old wounds. It had hurt to think of them when Noctis wasn’t there.

Kissing him now was a salve on every black day he couldn’t sink into Noct and cherish _this._ The ease with which Noctis invited him in, how soft and sweet the feel of his lips were beneath his. He’d tasted blood and scourge for so many years, he’d forgotten the taste of anything kinder. There were days he felt panic splitting through his bones because he couldn’t remember what Noctis’s kiss had felt like beneath the bitterness of the dark.

He was _starving_. All it took was a single press of that warm mouth back and he was forfeit. His arms locked around Noctis and he pushed so deep inside that kiss. His hand knotted into that long black hair, so different and still the same and he was bound to him again. Like there’d never been any distance. Like he’d never lost him, never failed to protect him, never lost his light with the rest of the world.

A noise like a cry passed from him into Noct and Noctis’s hands replied, hasting through the scruff on Nyx’s face, binding his braids around his wrists, and scraping hungering nails through his hair, mouth magnetized to his, just as desperate for a certainty that this was real. Nyx remembered it all as Noctis touched him, as Noctis felt through all the places he used to leave marks on, used to make Nyx _his_. It was all there, all the history in the movements, all the urgency in the breaths, all the passion, the adoring devotion.

They broke away just long enough for Nyx to look into his eyes, know him for what he was. His king, his little king. Bigger, older, but still there inside those eyes.

“So much has changed,” Noctis said, a small fault in his voice giving away his guilt, his horror that so much had come between them.

His fear that he didn’t belong to Nyx anymore. Nyx swept his hair from his face and remembered how to smile again. Just for him.

“Not everything, little king.”


End file.
